A Tale of Two Ayyashes

The UN, or much of it, has become both a sinister antisemitic organization and a Keystone-Kops operation of bigoted stumblebums. It recently has engaged in vituperative attacks on Israel for its attempt to ensure that never again will Israelis face the threat of attacks by Hamas, the terror group that committed the atrocities of October 7 and has promised to repeat them “again and again and again.” One of the recent charges made by Volker Turk, the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, has been that the IDF “deliberately” kills “journalists” in Gaza. There is no truth to this. Israel never targets civilians. Civilians are killed because Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad terrorists deliberately embed themselves, and their weapons, in the midst of civilian areas. Israel exchanges in an extensive campaign to warn civilians – by leafletting, messaging, and telephoning – away from places about to be targeted, but in the conditions of urban warfare, in one of the most densely populated areas on earth, civilian casualties are unavoidable. However, the IDF has managed to achieve a ratio of civilian-to-combatant deaths of 1:1, an unheard-of low ratio that has lead military experts such as British Colonel Richard Kemp to describe the IDF as “the most moral army in the world,” and Professor John Spencer of West Point to say that “Israel has implemented more precautions to prevent civilian harm than any military in history — above and beyond what international law requires and more than the United States did in its wars in Iraq and ­Afghanistan.”

As for those in Gaza who call themselves “journalists,” many are simply ordinary citizens who have decided to take advantage of the worldwide interest in the Gaza war to declare themselves “journalists,” or, if they have a camera, “photojournalists,” and then they offer their services, for extremely high pay, to the Western news agencies clamoring for stories and photographs from the war zone, especially if they show the Jewish state in a bad light. None of these “journalists” would ever dare to report anything that would anger Hamas; what’s more, the IDF has discovered, from documents it found in Gaza, that many of these “journalists” are not just fellow-travelers of Hamas, but are full-fledged members of the terror group.

Recently, one of the “journalists” in Gaza whom the office of Volker Turk, the UN High Commissioner on Human Rights, had declared dead — killed by the mad-dog murderers of the IDF — turned up alive. A gross error. But apparently not an error that the UN saw fit to correct everywhere. Robert Spencer wrote about this briefly here, and more on this seriocomic episode can be found here: “UN credibility on Israel, Palestinians ‘in serious doubt,’ after error about Gazan ‘journalist,’” by Mike Wagenheim, JNS, April 9, 2024:

A U.N. office stands corrected after having “verified” the death of someone it referred to as a Gazan journalist. But despite the U.N. Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights assuring JNS [Jewish News Service] that it issued a correction after the United Nations found out the person in question was still alive, the error remains on several pages on the U.N. website.

The OHCHR [UN Office of the High Commissioner on Human Rights] issued a Dec. 14 press release expressing its “alarm” by “an unprecedented rate of journalists and media workers who have been killed in Gaza since Oct. 7.” The U.N. agency claimed to have “verified the killing of 50 journalists and media workers, and has received information that 30 more may have died, amounting to approximately 6% of all those registered with the Journalists’ Syndicate in Gaza.”

What is a “media worker”? The designation must refer to those who, while not journalists themselves, facilitate the work of journalists, to make their reports possible. Some are drivers who take the journalists around Gaza. Some keep the journalist’s cameras and computers in good working order. Some seek out sites where the damage to people and property is most dramatic, so that photos of those sites have the desired anti-Israel effect on audiences everywhere. They locate the streets and neighborhoods where the damage is horrific, every building collapsed and crumpled into dust, find for the journalists you work for a particularly touching family scene, where there are children with blood on their faces, the sobbing of grieving mothers, the dead wrapped in winding sheets, the fathers shaking their fists in fury (and sometimes the journalists err, and the parents they’ve recorded are not anathematizing the Israelis but, rather, Hamas).

On December 14, the OHCHR released a report on the killing of journalists in Gaza.

In the fifth of the release’s 18 paragraphs, OHCHR noted that “Mr. Mustafa Ayyash, the founder and director of the Gaza Now News Agency, was killed along with at least eight members of his family, including children, in an apparent airstrike on his house in Al Nuseirat Camp on Nov. 22.”

That claim remains in a document that appears several times on the U.N. website.

Among those whom the U.S. Treasury Department sanctioned on March 27, for “having materially assisted, sponsored or provided financial, material or technological support for, or goods or services to or in support of, Hamas,” was “Gaza Now and its founder Mustafa Ayyash,” apparently very much alive. (The United Kingdom took similar actions.)

The publication Gaza Now announced the next day [Dec. 15] that Austrian authorities had arrested Ayyash. It was not clear publicly how Austrian authorities tracked Ayyash, but Vienna gave no indication it had arrested a dead man….

Mustafa Ayyash was not just any journalist, but the founder and director of Gaza Now, a major publication, linked to Hamas, with nearly two million followers. After Ayyash was arrested in Austria, Gaza News soon after closed down.

As the UN OHCHR finally reported, it was not the “journalist” Mustafa Ayyash, the founder and director of the Gaza Now News Agency, who was killed in an Israeli airstrike on November 22, but his cousin Muhamad Moiein Ayyash. It took a long time, more than four months, from November 22 when the airstrike first took place,  to April 5, for the OHCHR to issue a correction. Meanwhile the damage had been done: the world was led to believe , and to continue to believe for many months, that the IDF had killed a prominent journalist, the founder of his own news agency in Gaza

While OHCHR updated the release on ReliefWeb, the United Nations has apparently scrubbed any trace of the original release on the humanitarian portal and on OHCHR’s website.

The incorrect information published about Mustafa Ayyash’s death remains active on the U.N.’s webpage for information about the organization’s Palestinian advocacy and on the same site’s monthly bulletin from December.

“This incident and many others indicate the urgent need for significant organizational reforms,” Truzman told JNS. “At present, the U.N.’s credibility in matters concerning Israel and the Palestinians is in serious doubt.

How was it that the OHCHR mixed up the prominent photojournalist with his cousin? And why did it take more than four months for OHCHR to issue a correction, long after the earlier story had been disseminated around the world? And why on the OHCHR webpage has the claim about Mustafa Ayyash’s “death” — he is very much alive and being held by the Austrian police — still not been taken down? And when will OHCHR issue an apology for its gross error?

Given its record of error, of which the Ayyash mixup is only one example, it’s best not to believe a thing that comes out of the UN about Israel and the Palestinians.